Dec 31

Dec 31 These Are the Most Incredible Places I Traveled To In 2020

At the start of 2020, I made two statements that I have now come to regret: “I need to take a couple of months off traveling” and “I don’t want to travel around the holidays ever again.”

That’s right, just before the world shut down and jet setting became a distant memory I actually wished for more time at home and a break from traveling. I owe the world an apology.

I did have a valid reason for being a little burnt out. After all, my fall 2019 schedule had involved two weeks of island hopping in Greece and four weeks jumping between South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, back to Thailand, Singapore, back to Thailand, and a 30-hour journey to get home one week before the holidays.

I ended up with bad jet lag and a cold that lasted until Christmas.

So I did intentionally take the first couple months of 2020 off from traveling to recoup and plan the epic vacations I had in mind for the year — Norway, Croatia, Banff, and the French Riviera were all on the table. By the time I was getting reinvigorated and planning a quick hop home to Florida in March, everything went berserk.

Luckily I hadn’t made any big reservations yet that I had to cancel, but nonetheless, it was beyond disappointing both personally and professionally to not venture beyond states that I’ve lived in this year. Not to mention, the total desolation of my business that came along with travel being #canceled.

So, without further ado and whining, these are the few places I managed to “travel” to this year, using the loosest definition of the word.

Galveston

My mom came to visit in January and I decided to take her to this cute little beach town about an hour down the road from where I live. Even though it is close, I had not spent much time exploring Galveston, so we went and walked around the historic downtown district, rode the trolley and got some brunch. Little did I know, I would get very familiar with the town this year since it’s the closest vacation spot to me.

My Backyard

I think we all established a new definition for “exploring our own backyard” this year. That used to mean all the cool things around us, maybe the next town over or a state park nearby.

But nope. In 2020, many of us literally never went further than our patios, gardens, and neighborhood park for weeks at a time. It only took me until April to be bored enough to set up a photoshoot in my backyard, and by the end of the year, I’d done a handful of content shoots featuring my overgrown grass and pecan tree.

It did stretch the bounds of creativity, though, trying to find anything within a 5-mile radius to take a photo of!

Alabama

This trip at the beginning of May almost couldn’t happen because interstate travel where we needed to go was shut down until the day we left. But, my sister-in-law was getting married in an immediate family only fashion and we did everything we could to be there. We ended road-tripping from Texas through Arkansas and Tennessee to northern Alabama to avoid Lousianna, which was a “hot spot” at that time.

On the way back, I decided to stop in the town of Florence, Alabama, to walk around the historic downtown because I was so desperate to capture the travel feeling.

Galveston Again

I ended up spending a week at a hotel in Galveston, a beach town less than an hour from my house, in May. It wasn’t exactly a vacation and my hotel was a dump, but it was nice to jog along the waterfront and listen to the sound of the waves.

Alabama Again

In the summer, I returned to Alabama for my sister-in-law’s wedding part two because it was 2020 and everything was complicated. Luckily, I did not get ill, but I did somehow return with a case of lice. What an award-winning year.

Galveston Again

For the past three years, I’ve taken birthday trips to Iceland and New York (2017), Prague, Vienna and Budapest (2018) and Greece (2019). To blow all of those out of the water, I decided to spend my 2020 birthday on the dirt-colored sand of Galveston Beach.

Florida

Finally, the closest thing to a vacation this year was a trip to Florida in December. It was supposed to be a Thanksgiving trip to see my family, but we had a last-minute close call illness exposure and had to cancel the holiday part.

We were able to reschedule part of the trip and do a couple of days at Disney to see the resorts decorated for Christmas before spending the weekend with my family.